Deborah Levy draws her epigraph for The Cost of Living from Marguerite Duras’s Practicalities: ‘You’re always more unreal to yourself than other people are.’ Practicalities (1987) is a series of interviews Duras gave to a young friend with all the questions left out and the interview format effaced. Levy’s book is, similarly, one side of an intense conversation about life, love, power, home-making and writing. Her interlocutors, many of them dead but still living through their words and work, include Simone de Beauvoir, Louise Bourgeois, Emily Dickinson, Barbara Hepworth and Elena Ferrante.
Levy is a playwright and novelist whose Swimming Home (2012) and Hot Milk (2016) were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The Cost of Living is subtitled ‘A Living Autobiography’ and follows Things I Don’t Want to Know: A Response to George Orwell’s 1946 Essay ‘Why I Write’ (2013). The book covers a turbulent time in Levy’s life when she got divorced and her mother died in the same year.
Levy depicts her divorce as a shipwreck after decades of marriage:
If we don’t believe in the future we are planning, the house we are mortgaged to, the person who sleeps by our side, it is possible that a tempest (long lurking in the clouds) might bring us closer to how we want to be in the world.
She takes full responsibility for the consequences: ‘To unmake a family home is like breaking a clock.’ But sometimes there is no choice. Levy uses the fact that a fox can hear a clock ticking from 40 yards away to construct a powerful image of marital entrapment:
There was a clock on the kitchen wall of our family home, less than 40 yards from the garden. The foxes must have heard it ticking for over a decade.
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